Cable TV is expensive and with many people trying to cut back expenses (like me), many are choosing between no cable TV and paying quite a bit of money per month. The cheapest I could find that fills my TV requirements (HD and DVR) is DishHD for $40/month. The hardware and channel selection isn’t as good as if I got cable, but cable costs $50+/month for HD + DVR. I’ve had no cable for a while before because there are few shows that I actually want to watch on a regular basis. However, there are a few shows that Jacqueline and I are hooked on and we have a newborn at home that limits our ability to do things together outside the home (not for much longer I hope). Therefore, it will make entertaining while holding/feeding/taking care of our baby difficult without cable, so we would heavily prefer some form of TV entertainment. But I don’t want to pay a monthly fee for 3-5 shows + sports. Luckily there’s a 3rd solution that I’m seriously considering doing – setting up a home media center that plays media from the internet or another computer on my home network.
What has stopped me from setting up a home media center instead of having cable TV was the lack of TV shows that I could legally acquire and the serious lack of live sports available. Nowadays, almost all my shows are obtainable free and legally with Hulu and its like. Everyday more shows are going online. The only hit is live sports – which hurts because I really enjoy watching basketball (there is NBA League Pass online, but a large portion of them are blocked out and the quality is inconsistent). There are also additional bonuses with using a media center that somewhat offset lack of watching live sports like easily watching shows from current media collection, utilizing netflix online (we have a small subscription), and more.
I’m already paying for internet, so setting up a home media center is really just about up-front hardware costs and maybe some time spent every once in a while updating software or playing with settings (some of which I will enjoy). After searching around eBay and other sources for “XBMC”, “Boxee”, “Media Center”, and others it looks like this can be done with little to no work for as low as $150 (about 3.75 months of paying $40/month for cable. I don’t want to spend more than $300 (7.5 months @ $40/month) unless its really awesome. If I want to put more work in it, I may be able to take an extra desktop computer I have thats barely being used and make it workable for very little to no money. The only problem with the extra computer is that it may be too big to fit in an aesthetically appealing way in our living room.
[A few days later...]After working on my extra computer, I’ve got it working with a wireless keyboard and wireless network card that we already had. The wireless network card was necessary because the media center will be all the way across the house from the office where our router is. After installing XBMC (the extra computer doesn’t have a Media Center version of Windows on it) and setting it up for the local network, I was able to play videos directly off my main computer flawlessly through XBMC. Total cost $0! However, even with a wireless keyboard that works just fine from where I sit to watch TV, we still want a remote. I bought a new one off eBay for $13 (free shipping). An added unexpected bonus to the remote is that its supposed to be able to control the mouse cursor. Total real cost to replace cable: $13! Awesome.
You, dear reader, may not have already had the hardware that I had to make this possible. If you don’t have a router (I think most people do. If you have two or more computers hooked up to the internet, then you do.), thats an additional cost of about $50. I also already had an extra decent computer (it came with a mouse and keyboard) that I was able to get off craigslist for $100 in about September of 2008. A good search tool for Craigslist is CraigsPal. I also already had a wireless network card (Linksys wireless-g pci adapter) which can be had for around $20 on eBay. The XBMC software is free. That would bring the total to $183 for a whole media center system. Thats about 4.5 months @ $40/month cable or 3.66 months @ $50/month cable bill. Most people probably have a router already, so I would expect it to cost to be $133 (3.8 or 2.66 months of cable).
You can also just get a Linksys Wireless Media Center Extender for $80 off of eBay if you have a router and Windows Media Center on one of your home computers. However, this solution has its own limitations (read the reviews here). Many of the solutions that are one big package will have similar issues – not being able to play some file formats and not being able to stream off of hulu, youtube, netflix, etc. Which is why I like that I’ve done it with a computer. Perhaps someone could design or already has designed a product that is a slimmed down operating system (either a minimal Windows install or some version of Linux) that has a small (in size) hard drive + wireless/wired network connections + appropriate media outputs for $100-$150…
Once the media center is setup and payed for itself, I expect to save $420/year if I cancel my TV completely. I’m also considering just slimming down to local plus sports channels – which costs ~$11 with DishNetwork – and saving about $350/year. If you’re paying $50/month for cable, thats $600 or $530 per year. Putting the costs aside, there are some positives and negatives to having a media center instead of cable. For example, with a media center I get no live sports, but I can easily display pictures and play music and I have access to a larger selection and wider variety of video. On top of that, the amount of video available online is growing significantly every year. Plus, I find it fun to mess around with =)
I’ve just been informed by DishNetwork that I’ve signed a 2 year contract where I have to have at least the minimum package ($20). Oh well. At least I can get a little savings with more features.
